Iphone Virus

Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 8:35 pm under IT News Iphone Virus

iPhone Virus News: possible iPhone Virus is to be unleashed Thursday. Two researchers, Charles Miller and fellow cybersecurity researcher, Collin Mulliner, have found an iPhone bug that could infect phones virally through SMS. The have plans to reveal the still unpatched iPhone bug at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas today. If you receive a text message with a single square character, you are advised to immediately turn off your iPhone, as they warn it means that someone has used the bug to take over your iPhone. Iphone Virus

“This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone,” said cybersecurity researcher Charles Miller. “Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this.”

The two found the bug in the way the iPhone handles text messages. Once in control, the hacker has complete control over your iPhone, allowing them to make calls, visit websites, turn on the camera and more importantly they can keep sending the bug via SMS.

They have reached out to Apple, well over a month ago about this vulnerability but have not heard back. Back in 2007, Charles Miller also found a bug that allowed someone to remotely hijack the iPhone using the browser.

It’s not clear if Apple has included a fix in iPhone OS 3.1, which recently entered beta 3 stage, so will not be ready by Thursday. Be careful out there and maybe we’ll have more information this afternoon on a possible fix from Apple.

It’s not an iPhone virus, it’s just a security hole. Although Apple was notified by the iPhone SMS hack about 6 weeks ago, the company didn’t address this glitch and at the moment there is no patch that could fix it. According to the researchers, the iPhone SMS hack is possible thanks to a “serious memory corruption bug” caused by the way the iPhone handles an SMS.

Mulliner said that an similar SMS hack was found in the Android OS last week, and after only one day Google patched the security hole. Take that Apple! Why wouldn’t Apple patch the iPhone if the company knows about the security hole? What are these guys waiting? To hack every iPhone in the world? We’re waiting, but we’re not patient anymore.